Planning

 I am moving forward with my plan of starting a do-it-yourself program of study. I have been doing a lot of planning. I am going to assign myself to take classes each semester, which also involves scheduling the semester. I am even going to grade myself, based on the amount of time I spend versus the time that I have set as goals. I am planning on the first semester beginning on August 31, and ending on December 14. 

Initially I thought that I would take a few weeks to do prerequisites, in overviewing philosophy, brushing up on Shakespeare and reviewing writing advice, but I decided to make these classes into a full semester instead. It would involve a philosophy intro class of two hours a week, a Shakespeare review class of two hours a week and a craft of writing review class of one hour week. In the future I will try to limit myself to two classes per semester, but with more time devoted to each class. At the outset, I am going to use various video presentations as the equivalent of the class time, and I am going to use free videos for now. I have been looking at various sources for paid instructional videos, workshops and programs and I intend to incorporate those in future semesters. I started reviewing the paid programs and I definitely want to do that, but I am not in any hurry to start.

However it was challenging at first to find things that appeared worthwhile as free instructional courses, but the more I have looked the more I found. For the Shakespeare review, the plan is to read the Shakespeare plays that I have not read previously. That amounts to 17 plays, so perhaps I am biting off too much here. I plan to write summaries of the plays, a brief analysis and identify lines or speeches that stand out. It appears that almost all of the plays are available to watch in performance for free, so watching the performance will probably count as class time, although I may include some lecture videos as well.

I am excited also about the courses on philosophy that I have found. I have a philosophy textbook that I intend to make the outline for the course, and there is an introduction to philosophy course online from the University of Edinburgh that matches closely the text and looks to be of good quality. If there is any lecture that is not worthwhile, there are several other courses, including one from Yale, one from the University of Queensland Australia and one from Oxford, in addition to several philosophy podcasts.

Sooner or later I want to do the Brandon Sanderson writing class that is available for free online, but there are a lot of other writing resources that fit more closely with the first semester syllabus, which is simply to review the writing instruction books that I have read in the past, write summaries of them and do as many of the writing exercises as I can from them.

There are still a few other issues to resolve prior to starting in earnest but I am almost there and should be ready before the start date of Monday August 31.